[patchwork]

[QUOTE=PTTG;2061367]I like Daikoku a lot, it has a legitimate reason to interact peacefully with both stock powers, and yet it's a major threat. I'd up the TL for robotics for the sole reason of giving them mechs, but that's a stylistic choice. I haven't heard of the source, actually.

Well, one of the original setting cute bits is how much the inhabitants of Daikoku trust their machines despite not trusting each other, to the point of building nonsapient autonomous killing machines without much in the way of user interrupts. Foresight is just not a major part of their culture. They don't have mechs, but they do have some pretty scary drones.

Here's three more that are a little more obvious:

Sutenhotep

Sutenhotep is Pharaoh of nine worlds so far. He is at least 130 years old, he's been Pharaoh for 85 years, but he's not from around here; he seems to be a classic super-villain, perhaps even from the IST worlds, who got tired of getting beaten up by the heroes and having to break out of prison twice a year so buggered off to a bronze age world where his powers made him worshiped as a living god. And by this point, he may as well be. He avoids high-tech worlds, sticking to Egypt and Mesopotamia where Bronze Age cultures are likely to arise, wows them, and then brings them up to TL6 (although his empire has no scientific tradition; internal combustion, firearms and radio are gifts from the divine mind, not truly the work of men). He knows how to give his lieutenants superpowers, although the process is...unreliable and not without side effects. Megalomania is probably too mild a word for his current mental state, but his response to other outtime powers seems schizophrenic - on one level he knows it's wise to avoid contact with high-tech powers that could defeat him or destabilize his empire, on the other he really holds grudges and likes to prove his superiority over individuals...his parachronics are TL6^ and as such are almost completely incompatible with the major powers'.

Magna Verita

A TL10 craft - possibly alien, more likely parachronic from yet somewhere else - blew the arrival in the early 14th century here and the crew all died. Naturally, the Holy Office of the Inquisition was called in to investigate this manifestation; the AI answered general questions of the inquisitors but did not immediately cooperate. Still, this was obviously a church matter, and eventually it concluded that ownership had been legally transferred to the Church via salvage laws or the equivalent. Once it acknowledged the Holy See (in Avignon; even its general advice had been enough to beat out the Romans) as its legitimate owner, it began honoring more requests, such as building TL10 autodocs to provide miracles of healing, powered armor and vibroswords ("I could have given them a laser cannon, but they asked for swords and armor - whatever, he's the boss") spawning new instances of itself. With such power, the Reformation was put down brutally, Meccah was conquered in the 17th century, and the conquest of the New World and Australia was astonishingly swift and brutal (the native cultures are entirely gone on MV). India and China persist as "heathen" states too big to easily conquer and assimilate. Tech is schizophrenic; there are no trains or satellites because the "angels" have never been asked to make them. But TL10 medicine is pretty firmly developed and widely spread, including surgical procedures to make the willful more obedient to God and less sinful. Other technologies are extremely hit and miss, as comfort has simply never been the driving force behind technology here. Like Sutenhotep, it doesn't really have a native scientific tradition, although the AI has tried to impart clear understanding of the laws of physics as it understands them (which included parachronics, eventually). MV's efforts outtime are furtive; the Holy See understands that its miracles are much less impressive to cultures steeped in sinful technology, but worries that mass invasion could have unfortunate consequences back home. Its preferred mode of converting others is thus to precipitate a major disaster - bioengineered plague or environmental cataclysm, say - and then appear from nowhere with the cure. It actually handles "honest heathens" much better than "heretics". MV is aware of Steel; it sees the Zoneminds as fallen angels, and what, if anything, to do about them is a matter of intense debate. (actually, it just occured to me - wouldn't it be kind of fun to make the MV "advent" a failed experiment of Brisbane's?)

Malgest

Call them demons; they might as well be. On Malgest, humans are kept as slaves and food animals by a winged hermaphroditic social predator. It is both a low-mana world and a technologically advanced one, TL10 in medicine and weaponry, 9 in most everything else. The Malgesti have a philosophical problem with the multiverse; they crumble to dust in no-mana worlds, and 90% of the multiverse is no-mana. Humans are everywhere, yet they have never found another world anywhere with them on it. It seems the cosmos was made for humans, and their supremacy, perhaps even their existence, is an aberration. They certainly didn't evolve, as they have no antecedents in the fossil record, and no archaeological records of their own existence prior to about 1200 BC. They have a religion and holy text (or two), but as scientific proof it is no more useful or valid than comparable human religious texts. They prefer to think they were made by a god, since the alternative - human magic gone awry - would be much more humiliating. If they were banestormed in, where is the world they evolved on? But they cannot seem to establish contact with their creator, whatever it is. And humans definitely came before them.

Outtime, the Malgesti are usually encountered only as their human slaves, with behavior-modifying spinal implants and deadman-switched cranial bombs, sent to gather information and report back to the Gate at x time and place. Such a slave can be very dangerous with TL10 weapons. Occasionally they will set up a front to lure outtime humans in to replenish their slave pens. On a world with mana or with a mana enhancer, an encounter with an actual malgesti should be terrifying. They have never used a currency-based system for allocating resources, so their complete lack of experience with the concept of "money" even if they grasp it intellectually often trips them up.

On Malgest, they proceed cautiously with parachronics. The discovery that humans are the "real" owners of the multiverse leads to paranoid reaction in some quarters and arguments for emancipation and a more equal (probably not fully equal) relationship with humans in others. Previous Dread Princes have allowed wild humans to persist in some preserves, primarily to enjoy more challenging hunts and test whelps; the idea that those wild humans have nearly limitless allies if they get their hands on a conveyor is starting to make that look like a bad, bad idea.